


Kill Nothing But Time

by slipthroughknot



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Dark, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-30
Updated: 2011-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-17 08:53:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipthroughknot/pseuds/slipthroughknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sharon isn't her real name, but it will do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kill Nothing But Time

She follows them with no specific pattern. She's a much better class of criminal, unlike most of the rabble that the 5-0 team usually follows. Her flip-flops spray wet flecks of sand on her calves as she walks on the beach, a comfortable distance between her and the four of them. The margarita in her hand is delicious, the rim coated with just enough salt, the lime tart and refreshing -- she relishes the few sips that she's allowed herself. It's easier to play a slightly tipsy tourist if she's at least tasted some liquor, and besides, she doesn't need to kill them today anyway. She picks up her pace until she's close enough to pretend to trip, just enough so that she pushes Williams as her hands stretch out as she tries not to fall. The margarita splashes on the back of Williams’ shirt.

"Hey," he yells out, and she covers her mouth with her hand.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry," she says. "It's just, this sand, I'm not really used to it. Are you OK?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," he says. McGarrett looks at the scenario with a smirk on his face. Kalakaua and Kelly are a bit further ahead and haven't noticed that they're going ahead without the rest of their team.

"He has a lot of those shirts," McGarrett says. "So don't worry about it."

"You can shut up," Williams says, which McGarrett just rolls his eyes at. He turns to her and asks, "Enjoying Hawaii so far?"

"Yeah," she answers, smiling in what she's been told is a great impression of a shy girl being flustered by the attentions of attractive men. "How did you know I'm a tourist?"

"I think we're marked the minute we get off the plane," Williams says. He has a great smile, with his eyes crinkling attractively. Pity.

"I guess so," she says, and bends down enough to show off her cleavage. "Sorry about stumbling into you." She looks up and sees McGarrett's face change subtly as he looks at Williams, who had looked at her chest for a second. "How much will cleaning the shirt cost?"

"Don't worry about it." Williams puts his hands in his pockets, McGarrett folds his arms across his chest. Interesting.

"Tell you what," she says. "My name's Sharon and I'm at Room 314 at the Marriott. Look me up, and I'll make it up to you."

Williams grins at her, appealing and crooked. "I might just take you up on that." Kalakaua and Kelly are walking back. McGarrett looks really unhappy, but changes his face whenever he notices her looking at him.

"Looking forward to it," she says, and walks away. She counts ten steps and looks back over her shoulder, making sure to pout her lips a little bit. They're all looking at her now, so she waves at them. Only Williams waves back.

~ ~ ~ ~

The margarita had a compound in it that could be absorbed by the skin into the organs. It was harmless on its own, but if it came into contact with a higher than usual level of mercury such as in fish, it would become lethal. It would manifest as anaphylactic shock. She had taken her last sip then put the compound in the glass.

Sharon knows that the team has plans for fish tacos that night. She won't get the 250k until Williams was dead. After that, there was just three to go.

~ ~ ~ ~

New Jersey is awful. It's bleak and gray and polluted, and after weeks basking in the sunshine and the salty scent of the ocean, Jersey is particularly terrible.

She wears her best black suit and gets her biggest sunglasses. She stands at a distance, making sure she was far enough away from McGarrett, enough distance that she can run quickly enough if he even looks in her direction. Navy SEALs are badasses who should never be underestimated. She grabs the small binoculars in her purse and observes.

There's a young girl crying really loudly, audible even at this distance, and Sharon feels a pang of regret. Parents are always tough to kill -- even monsters had children that loved them, and from her research, she knows that Williams was anything but. The ex-wife is holding her daughter back. Kalakaua's crying too, leaning on her cousin, whose face looks set in stone. Sharon sees McGarrett's face and it's confirmation that her suspicions are true. There's world-ending grief in those eyes, this desperate rage that doesn't have any healthy outlets because what happened was an accident, a random fluke of fate.

She'd spied on them before. Long nights in McGarrett's house with beers, always leaning too close to each other. They hadn't fucked, at least not as far as she observed, but they were probably close to it. Too many accidental touches and long looks. The most telling thing that she ever saw were their hands right beside each other on a table, Williams’ right and McGarrett's left, touching but never moving away.

She tucks away her binoculars just in time -- Kalakaua had straightened and looked in her direction. Sharon keeps her head bowed and walks away, each step deliberate. No rush, no rush. Her iPhone zings and she smiles, thinking of the holiday she would take with the money that was just delivered to her account.

~ ~ ~ ~

Logic would dictate that McGarrett would be the next kill, but that's too obvious. It's Kelly she goes after, and he is easy pickings, even though he probably wouldn't have been if his head was completely in the game. The beauty of grief, she thinks, as she's adjusting the air conditioning vents that led to Kelly's place, was that it distracts so well. She can't afford any direct contact with the team anymore because that would arouse suspicion. The second kill would raise plenty soon enough. Kalakaua and McGarrett aren't idiots.

The canisters hiss as they pump carbon monoxide into Kelly's place. They pump out 12,800 ppm so it will be a quick death and it's going to suck for him in those few minutes, but she couldn't risk him gaining consciousness to call 911.

She takes out her iPhone and tries to clear the Halloween version of _Angry Birds_ , making sure the volume's on low. The music's really catchy, and she's humming along as the canisters empty out. In about an hour, she has only one star for the first five levels in the game. She can kill a man from the top of a skyscraper but she can't get the mechanics of putting birds in slingshots to destroy green pigs.

She dumps the canisters in the ocean on her way back to the hotel.

~ ~ ~ ~

The bug in McGarrett's office picks everything up flawlessly.

"This isn't an accident," Kalakaua says, her voice raw. "This is a pro." Sharon takes a mental bow.

"But who?" McGarrett asks. He sounds equally destroyed.

"I don't know," Kalakaua says, and breaks down.

"I asked Rachel's permission to have Danny's body exhumed," McGarrett says. Sharon would tip her hat at him if she could.

"Oh my God," Kalakaua says. "You think Danny..."

"The doctors never bothered looking deeper. Everything else pointed to an allergic reaction."

Sharon hears rustling, a door being shut, what sounds like blinds being shut or drawn.

"I can't take this, Kono." And McGarrett cries in that awful way that repressed men cry because they don't do it that often. It's broken sobs and hitching breath and panicky sounding gasps. They growl because they're ashamed something's made them weep.

"Steve," Kalakaua says, and Sharon would guess they're hugging right now by the sound of it. She turns off the bug in respect for their grief -- she has never liked this part.

~ ~ ~ ~

The beautiful part of this scheme is that she can get more obvious now that the team is down by two members. She took Williams and Kelly out first intentionally: Kelly would have been the logical one who can course-correct anything that derailed, while Williams kept McGarrett in line. Now she's left with Kalakaua and McGarrett, the hot-headed, impulsive ones. They'll make more mistakes because they're too emotional.

They're both under police protection now, the governor getting spooked enough to post more people in the 5-0 office. There's a 24-hour guard at McGarrett's and Kalakaua's place now too, and McGarrett, true to form, thinks he can handle it himself so he takes unnecessary risks. She follows him for days, observing routines, laughing whenever he escapes his escorts. True to form, no matter what he believes, he thinks whoever's after him is a man. Well, it's true enough that she was hired by a man, but she's still the one doing the active killing. She'd be offended if it wasn't so predictable -- even assassins have institutionalized sexism in the power structure.

In about a week's time, she's memorized his pattern. His most vulnerable window of time is in the morning, when he picks up Kalakaua from her apartment.

On a beautiful, sunny day, Sharon takes her rifle and perches on the window of a building across the street from Kalakaua's place. She paid two months’ rent for the apartment, the landlord beaming at the payment in cash. She had done her best Paris Hilton impersonation, an idiot with too much money and not enough sense.

At 6:33 am on a Tuesday morning, she takes careful aim through her window and pulls the trigger. The back of McGarrett's head is blown off and his police guard panics. She walks to her bathroom and dumps the rifle in there, knowing every other identifying mark on it has been stripped away. She changes into a sun dress and casually strolls out of the building, expresses concern about what's happening and she's even interviewed by the police and detained for questioning as a witness.

"I just walked out of my apartment, officer," she says. "Then I saw this terrible thing. Did he have a family?" The officer is too distracted to answer, and she's free soon enough.

She checks her account later on and she's 500k richer. She squeals in delight at the bank, and the guy in the next ATM smiles at her, very obviously checking her out. She smiles at him, and then walks out.

~ ~ ~ ~

Kalakaua she's going to take on woman to woman. Or she would, if she could find her. The governor freaks out and the entire state is crawling with cops and the FBI looking for answers. Kalakaua is hidden away somewhere for her own protection. Good thing that Sharon had taken the precaution of telling her employer that the plan of escalation would make the last target the hardest to kill. She could almost feel her employer shrug through the distorted voice over the phone -- Kalakaua was considered the least of the targets, which had pissed Sharon off at the time.

She walks back to her rented apartment, slightly discouraged. It had been days since McGarrett's death and she was hoping to have been out of here by now, even if she realistically knew that it wouldn't happen that quickly. Her key twists in the lock, and when she takes the first step in, a punch connects, hitting her on her right jaw. She stumbles against the door, but she's kicked into the apartment with a deadly roundhouse, the door slamming shut behind her assailant.

"You bitch!" Kalakaua. Sharon is very, very impressed. She stays on the floor on all fours, and then kicks out with her right leg, catching Kalakaua on the thigh. Sharon rolls up and puts her fists up; they circle each other warily in the dim apartment.

"Very impressive," Sharon says. Kalakaua says nothing, her mouth a grim line.

"Who are you working for?"

"Don't know, darling, and don't much care," Sharon says.

Kalakaua laughs then, and it's a horrible sound. "You're just a gun for hire?" she asks in disbelief.

"One of the very best, my dear," Sharon says.

"So you have no information." Kalakaua sags just then, and Sharon strikes, but not quickly enough. Kalakaua parries and spins away, so they circle each other again.

"The police will be here soon enough," Kalakaua says.

"Pity," Sharon says, and tackles her opponent. She catches Kalakaua around the waist and they tumble to the floor. They roll around, the other trying to gain the upper hand until Sharon gets her arm around Kalakaua's neck and squeezes. Kalakaua flails out and gets lucky, hitting her in the face, enough to loosen her grip and she grits her teeth in frustration as she sees Kalakaua get up. The two of them have their hands up ready to fight, until Sharon hears the sirens in the distance.

"You're done," Kalakaua says. She sounds just like she did when Sharon was eavesdropping on her and McGarrett. "Even if I don't kill you, the police will catch you." Kalakaua is trying not to cry. "Why did you do this?" she asks.

Sharon looks at her and says as kindly as she can, "I was paid to." It's the best answer she has, it's the only answer she has. She sits on the floor and waits. The police would be here soon enough. I've had a good career, she thinks, and observes Kalakaua as she stands guard, a resolute figure cast in grief.

THE END


End file.
